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Climate Change & the Media

Program #HACR001.
Recorded in Burnaby, BC
on March 27, 2017.

Climate change poses a long-term threat to humanity and the Earth. Sixty percent of people get their news from TV. How are the networks reporting on the crisis? This is from a study from Media Matters, a non-profit media watchdog organization: “In 2016, evening newscasts and Sunday shows on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox, collectively decreased their total coverage of climate change by 66 percent compared to the previous year, even though there were a host of important climate-related stories, including” global record-breaking temperatures, “the signing of the Paris climate agreement, and numerous climate-related extreme weather events. Apart from PBS, the networks also failed to devote significant coverage to climate-related policies, but they still found the time to uncritically air climate denial - the majority of which came from now-President Donald Trump and his team.”

Speaker(s):

Robert Hackett, a leading critic and media theorist, is professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, SFU in Burnaby, BC. He has published widely on media issues. He is co-author of Journalism and Climate Crisis.

The winds of political change blow from all directions. For many decades they’ve blown hardest from the Right – a corporate-friendly, conservative agenda involving endless war and military spending and...